Eggshells
by vacant houses
Summary: Crack. In which there was supposed to be a plot and it doesn't happen. Addendum: Raphael vanishes for ten years. Then he comes home. There must be easier ways to see the world.
1. Plot What plot?

TMNT= Not Mine

Written because I have a ton of assignments and I'm a Grade A procrastinator :(

Believe it or not, I had trouble writing up the first bit of Leo's dialogue. SplinterMarkTwo!Leo is a pain to write. How does the fandom manage it without cringing at the repetitiveness and the inanity?

I could have sworn there was a point to this. I think it's fair to say I lost the plot. I don't even, what-

If you can figure out what I was on about, please let me know. Because I don't.

* * *

It was a regular day in the turtle lair. Regular, of course, by mutant ninja turtle standards involve a great deal of insanity. Breakfast had been spent evicting several hapless teenage girls that had made their way down to the sewers and were queuing up for ninjitsu lessons. Mid-morning tea had seen Leonardo kidnapped, tortured and returned, Donatello impregnated and Michelangelo had sunk into a deep depression from which he never emerged and eventually drowned.

And then he was subsequently resurrected by the purity of his soul. It's an endless cycle and his brothers had since become immune to his attention seeking behaviour.

It was around lunchtime that Raphael returned home from selling Donatello's latest child to Agent Bishop.

Leonardo shot off the couch from where he'd spent the past hour camped out like a zombified Apple user just before a new smart phone was released. "Where," Leoardo the Magnificent/glorified Splinter guard dog began, "Have you been?"

Raphael slowed to a stop several steps away from the lair's entrance. He deliberately glanced behind him at the doorway, an eye-ridge raised in polite befuddlement. "Out," he said, gesturing vaguely at the door. "Yanno, visiting Bishop like we always do after Don gets knocked up."

"How could you have been so reckless?" his brother raged, pacing back and forth. "You're endangering the family!"

Raph rocked back on his feet, unperturbed by Leo's temper. "Leo, you were the one who made this arrangement," he said, quite reasonably. "There's a roster and everything. By your hand."

"You COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED, RAPH! KILLED!"

"You did this yesterday. And Mikey did it the day before."

"I am not trying to be a hard-case! I'm just trying to protect the family! You can't keep doing this Raph!"

"Er…what?" Raphael glanced around for help. Unfortunately, Donatello was still sleeping off his recent pregnancy and Michelangelo had reverted into a baby as a side-effect of his recent resurrection. As for Master Splinter, well, he'd clearly stopped existing the moment the turtles had fallen into the mutagen.

"Going out with Casey to bash Purple Dragons," there was a look in Leonardo's eyes. The daily inanity had evidently worn down his defences and crawled inside his brain. "Coming back at stupid o'clock in the morning!"

"It's lunchtime," his brother pointed out peaceably.

Leonardo grasped his brother by his shoulders. "What is wrong with you?!" he demanded, shaking Raphael. "You, you're too calm! You can't be my brother! You can't!"

"Jeez Leo," Raphael rolled his eyes, "Can't a turtle turn over a new leaf? Being angry and rebellious is _so _last year."

"Master Splinter!" Leonardo shot away from his brother and headed for the dojo. "Master Splinter, Raphael is being weird! His weirdness is dangerous! It's going to kill us all!"

"Leo, Master Splinter has his own room. And he doesn't exist any way!"

Leo paused.

The meaning of this sentence slowly began to make its way through his brain.

(Meanwhile, in another dimension, hell froze over. Or perhaps that was the Utrom Shredder? No, wait, never mind.)

"What," Leo said, eerily calm, "Do you mind Master Splinter doesn't exist?"

His brother stared at him with pity in his eyes. "Leo, bro, we've been over this so many times. Master Splinter is a figment of your imagination, an imaginary friend that you've had ever since we mutated."

"We learnt ninjitsu from him," Leonardo said blankly.

Raphael tilted his head slightly and gave a weak smile. "Bro, we can't even perform ninjitsu! Besides, how the hell would a rat learn ninjitsu anyway?"

"By watching his Master Yoshi," his brother parroted instantly.

"And you don't think that's strange, that an ordinary rat would pick up ninjitsu like that?"

"No stranger than mutant, humanoid turtles!" Leo protested.

Raphael leant forward and gave him a comforting pat on his head. "Who says we're turtles?" he whispered, and then sauntered past.

"No," his brother denied in horror, "We-we can't be! We're not humans!"

Raph paused on the threshold of his room. "Don't be ridiculous Leo. That would be disgusting. We're mutant nematodes."


	2. Long distance travelling

TMNT is not mine.

Maybe this can be my series of half brained, almost-fics. I see drabbles are the new thing on the front page.

* * *

It was a regular morning in the turtle lair. Regular in this case meant the mutant family, minus one anti-social brother, was gathered round the table as they ate breakfast. Things had been quiet lately, the Foot and the Purple Dragons had been lying low, Leo and Raph hadn't been fighting. In fact, Raphael had gone for a night out with Casey the previous evening and Leo hadn't spoken a word in protest. So yeah. Things were peaceful.

Of course, it had to end.

Raphael stumbled home, looking bleary and…aged. His family surveyed him for half a moment in surprise, he was covered in scars that looked long healed and he was wearing an eye-patch. The nasty, deep gash above his right eye probably meant that he'd lost the actual eyeball.

"Holy shit," Michelangelo uttered what the rest of his family was thinking, "Raph, what the hell happened to you?"

The turtle stumbled to the empty chair at the table. "Would you," he began in a gravelly tone, "Believe that I've been gone for ten years?"

x x x

"So what happened?" Leonardo asked. "I mean, April said Casey got home fine last night."

They had gathered in the dojo. Looking at Raphael's ravaged body had completely put them off breakfast. The idea that their brother had been gone for so long seemed preposterous, but the scars was definite evidence that it hadn't been 12 hours since Raphael had last seen them.

"Right," Raphael gathered his thoughts. "Okay, so on my way home, last night for you guys…I got captured."

"The Foot?" Leonardo asked as his family tensed.

Raph gave a harsh laugh. "Nah. Course not. That's _your _thing. Me, I got captured by crazy circus people. They packed me up and shipped me off to just about every place on the planet."

"Okay," Don said. Dealing with Renet meant the family had long become inured to complexities of time travel. "Does this mean that that's about to happen to you? The Raphael of our time?"

Their (much) older brother gave him an unamused smile. "Yep," his gaze slid up to the clock. "I'd say I'm just about ten minutes from being flown to Australia."

"WHAT?!" his family demanded.

"Dude, why didn't you say that sooner?" Mikey demanded.

Raphael awarded his brother an unimpressed look. "What, so you can go rescue past me, cause a paradox and mess up the timelines?"

Mikey opened his mouth to object, thought for a moment, and then closed it. Leo on the other hand was not so convinced. "There's got to be something that we can do," he said urgently.

"Yeah, well, this is it," Raph waved a dismissive hand at himself. "I got free eventually and made my way back home. You guys were all horrified and called up Renet and demanded she fix this."

"So she sent you here?" Donatello's face wrinkled in confusion. "I don't see how this helps."

"Well she was convinced that this was for the best, if young, volatile me had stuck around, one of you guys would have wound up dead at some point in the near future. She said this was the only viable way you could have those ten years with me without destroying all of reality trying to 'fix' my timeline."

The mutant family frowned in puzzled acceptance. If this was the best Renet could do for them, well, it was better than no Raph at all or one of them dying shortly thereafter. It was weird and unusual but since when had their lives been normal anyway?

"Besides," Raphael said with a relieved sigh, "You guys would not believe the amount of angst I'm saving you from. Your future selves were depressing and useless as hell."


End file.
